


Your Star

by Jenshih_Blue



Series: Open the Door ~ A Modern Day Fairy Tale in 13 Parts [11]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M, Season/Series 03, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-15 22:10:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10558504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenshih_Blue/pseuds/Jenshih_Blue





	

 

“Son, we have to go.”

 

Sam didn’t really hear Bobby’s words. Even if he had it wouldn’t have mattered. All that mattered was the man cradled in his shaking arms. Beautiful eyes, pupils blown wide, and specks of crimson spattered across his face trying to blend in with the freckles he’d counted so many times and failing to do so.

 

“Sam.”

 

The gentle touch of the older man’s hand on his shoulder sent a burning hot rage through him. Couldn’t he see he was grieving? How could he try to make him leave his brother behind?

 

“No,” he growled low in his throat, shrugging away the comforting hand. “I’m not leaving him. I can’t leave him.”

 

Bobby’s eyebrow shot up beneath the brim of his cap. “Of course, we ain’t leaving him, boy. He deserves better than that, but we have to get the hell out of dodge before any of those black-eyed bitches come back.”

 

A shudder traveled through Sam’s body as he struggled to his feet, Dean cradled close to his chest. His grief was etched in every line of his tear streaked face, his lashes clumped, and eyes bloodshot. He blindly followed the man he and his brother had looked on as a father. It didn’t matter who was in front of him and that was clear to Bobby. If the demons were to return Sam would be zero help with the fight. Not that he could blame the kid.

 

He glanced over his shoulder at Sam and his gut twisted in a knot. Sam’s attention was focused solely on Dean. His expression disturbed Bobby on some level. There was something not quite right. Yes, he was angry, grieving, but there was more in his gaze than should be there. Bobby didn’t have time though to analyze it beyond that. They were in a dangerous situation and they needed to move as quickly as possible.

 

***

 

By the grace of God, they managed to get back to where their cars were parked without seeing a single demonic son of a bitch. Bobby was surprised, but then maybe the sick fucks had fled just as their mistress had. They’d gotten what they wanted and in the process had destroyed more than one life.

 

Bobby tried to tell Sam they needed to salt and burn Dean’s body, but Sam was having none of it. As he wrapped his brother’s lifeless corpse in a blanket and tucked him in the backseat he mumbled beneath his breath. The words Sam mumbled terrified Bobby beyond anything he’d ever heard.

 

“He’ll need his body when I get him back.”

 

 

***

 

Two days later in a wooded area outside Pontiac, Illinois as the sun rose Sam finished digging Dean’s grave. Shirtless and dirt covered he pulled himself up, muscles flexing in his arms and chest. When he was on his feet his eyes settled on where Bobby sat fashioning a primitive cross from branches and rope. Near by a plain pine box sat containing the earthly remains of his brother.

 

Sam knew Bobby thought he’d lost his mind. Any hunter worth his salt knew the best thing to do was salt and burn a body. At least then you could be certain the deceased would rest in peace. Of course, that was when someone died naturally and Dean’s death had been as far from natural as you could get. He’d lost his soul so Sam could come back—a life for a life. Sam hadn’t asked for the sacrifice. He wasn’t going to stand for it either. Come Hell or high water he was going to get his brother back.

 

“Sam?”

 

He looked up wiping the sweat from his eyes. “Don’t try and stop me, Bobby.”

 

Standing, Bobby shoved the cross into the ground with all the anger in him. “God damn it, boy! Do you think you’re the only one grieving?”

 

He turned away, refusing to look into the other man’s eyes. Sam was fully aware he wasn’t the only one grieving, but unlike Bobby, he was unwilling to let Dean go. It was odd how he’d been so fucking angry at Dean for making the deal to bring him back and yet…here he was getting ready to make the same mistake. It seemed no matter what the Winchester family had a proclivity to sacrifice themselves. Especially if it was one of their own. John had done it for Dean, Dean for Sam, and now.

 

“I know you’re grieving, Bobby.”

 

“Then you know too what will happen if you do what I think you’re about to do.”

 

Glancing up from the corner of his eye, Sam bit the inside of his lip. Bobby was right. He was fixing to do one of the stupidest things a hunter could do. No matter how much the logical side of his brain tried it couldn’t convince him any easier than Bobby could. He couldn’t leave Dean alone, suffering in Hell.

 

“Help me,” Sam whispered.

 

Bobby shook his head. “I’ll bury him, but damned if I bury you as well.”

 

***

 

That night in a lonely motel room on a stretch of no name road Sam stood in the shower washing away the grit and sweat of the past forty-eight hours. Hot water washing away the evidence of everything down the drain. Dean’s blood, the dirt from beneath his fingernails from a grave he never thought he would dig. His entire body vibrated with his grief, the agony of losing the most important person in his life. It was one thing to lose someone, but to watch them ripped into ribbons with no power to stop it.

 

When the tears had begun he had no idea. It didn’t matter, though. Tears would never make this right. They wouldn’t free Dean from Hell. They wouldn’t bring him back to the real world. The only thing that could do that was one of those crimson eyed bitches. The same kind who’d made the deal in the first place with Dean. He didn’t give a damn what that bitch he’d killed with the Colt said. Whoever held Dean’s contract had a name and he was going to find out who the son of a bitch was no matter what it took.

 

Shutting off the shower, he wrapped a towel around his waist. As he wiped steam from the mirror his thoughts went to the night before. He wondered if Dean had known the instant his soul, that bright burning star, had separated from his body. Or had he been alive one moment and dead the next with no sense of transition? Confused and alone in what Sam could never imagine in his worst nightmares.

 

Until he no longer had his brother at his side Sam never realized how bright Dean’s soul had shined as if it were a star burning through the darkest night. Now he was alone and he felt he would go mad without the love he’d shared in the shadows. The love they’d hidden from everyone around them.

 

Without even knowing what he was doing Sam slammed his fist into the mirror, glass shattering in a jagged spider web of cracks.

 

Crumpling to his knees he began to sob, choking on the very air he breathed. All he could do was lay there on the cold tile. The only word he could form was one—over and over.

 

“Dean…Dean…”

 

Was Hell so far away Dean couldn’t feel him calling his name?

 

***

 

Time moved differently in Hell that was the way of other dimensions. Not that Dean had known that before becoming Hell’s newest guest.

 

Lost in the darkness, strung up on meat hooks like a side of beef and surrounded by emerald green flames Dean screamed until his throat was raw. It wasn’t the physical pain alone that ripped the air from his non-existent lungs. It was the grief.

 

He’d felt everything that night. Not simply his physical death beneath the razor sharp claws of a hell bitch, but the emotional pain of being ripped from the only person he’d ever truly loved. The only other human in the world who understood his life, the life they shared. It wasn’t much of a life, but it had been theirs.

 

There were some who would believe what he and Sam had would automatically reserve them a seat in Hell. For him, it had been difficult to admit those feelings. Not that he believed for a second it hadn’t been hard for Sam, but then his brother had always been the thinker. He’d always weighed both sides and when Sam made a decision there was no escaping that decision.

 

Even if he’d wanted to escape Dean couldn’t have. Being with Sam was like riding a comet, a falling star in the darkness. How could the darkness feel wrong when the star was there shining brighter than anything Heaven could promise.

 

Now, though, he couldn’t see the star and the darkness felt so wrong without the light.

 

With each passing hour, every fear that had haunted him began to transform to a burning rage.  He knew Sam would have been proud of the rage as long as it was aimed at the demon before him. Except after thirty years, he allowed the rage to consume him in a blaze of hellfire and damnation.

 

What had broken him wasn’t the torture or even the mental suffering of watching others being tortured. What had truly broken him was a single word. A word screamed over and over for thirty years and there was never an answer.

 

His brother hadn’t heard his cries no matter how loud.

 

As Dean stood up from the rack, picked up the blade, and the last of his humanity vanished in a cloud of sulfur he questioned one thing.

 

Was Sam so far from Hell he hadn’t heard him calling his name?

 

***

 

Sam saw no other way to continue in this world.

 

He’s tried to make deals. He’d even tried to open a devil’s gate. Yet nothing he tried had worked. Dean was still rotting in Hell and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to stop it. He felt worthless. A waste of flesh and bone. The only thing he found to ease the horror was a bottle of whiskey to drown his despair and grief in.

 

The last damned soul he’d wanted to ever see again was Ruby. It was her fault Dean was gone. Lost in the one place he couldn’t here Sam screaming his name. Even when Sam said nothing he was screaming for his brother. When he’d lost his brother he’d lost everything. Dean’s death left him wandering alone with nothing left to fight for and then Ruby walked back into his existence.

 

Why the bitch saved his life he couldn’t imagine. All he wanted was to die. He’d failed Dean in every imaginable way. And as the darkness closed in around him what little of the light that remained of the man he loved had disappeared from sight. He was left wandering alone.

 

So, when Ruby had offered him an out he took it. Then again, he’d taken it, but not in the way she hoped. He was determined to end his life even if it meant playing her game.

 

***

 

When Dean awoke in his wooden prison he had no idea where he was or how he’d come to be there. Flashes of his time in Hell had woke him. Blood, fire, and the screams of the damned echoing in his skull. There seemed to be lost in the cacophony a familiar voice drawing him from the depths of the blood tinged shadows. A flicker of something resembling starlight—a glow of white—fading quickly.

 

His gut instinct told him that fading star was his brother. A soul tortured by failure and burned away by the mechanical lights along the lonely roads it traveled. City after city, town after town.

 

It was that thought that gave him the strength to claw his way to the surface pushing out of the earth like a baby from its mother’s womb. His birth back into the real world wasn’t easy, but no one ever said the life of a Winchester was easy. It had never been and it never would be.

 

When he surfaced he was confronted by what appeared to be ground zero of a nuke going off. What had been a grove of old growth forest was now a gigantic spiral of burnt matchsticks. Above the sun beat down on his already dehydrated and exhausted body, blinding him with a radiance that didn’t hold a candle to the star he had to find.

 

***

 

Everything he’d done and now he was confronted with the reason behind it all. It was impossible though. Dean was dead. Torn to ribbons. Shredded beyond hope. Buried beneath the rich black soil in a plain pine box. His soul had been claimed by Hell.

 

It took mere seconds for the shock of seeing his brother standing there in a motel room where moments before he’d been selling his own soul. Where he’d been doing things with a demon no decent hunter would be caught dead doing. That was when he lost what control he had left.

 

Flinging himself at the creature that dared wear his brother’s face he screamed in fury, slamming it against the wall. Knife posed to take its twisted existence. The words that spewed forth from his tortured soul were demanding in their pain.

 

It was Bobby that stopped him from committing the even greater sin.

 

When he realized it was really Dean his anger crashed and burned. This time when he flung himself across the space dividing them it was to engulf his brother in his arms and inhale a scent as familiar as his own. It didn’t matter who else was present in the room. All that mattered was the man who clung to him just as tight as he clung to him.

 

They pulled apart, chests heaving, and a million things said without a word passing either of their lips. If he hadn’t known better Sam would have thought this was a dream—a too perfect fantasy. And then someone spoke.

 

“So are you two like... together?”

 

He turned to look at his own personal damnation.

 

 **“** What? No. No. He's my brother.” Sam stuttered out.

 

Looking into her dark eyes Sam understood that she knew. He’d never told her. He’d tried to keep it their secret. A secret that had been buried in a lonely grave in a grove of trees in Illinois. A secret she had no right to know. For a split second the corner of her lips curved in a cruelly amused smirk before it vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Or perhaps it had simply been Sam’s imagination.

 

All he knew was despite everything he’d tried he’d simply grown colder until he’d been shattered into pieces. The silence after his brother’s death had broken him. And now Dean was back. His soul a star shining brighter than ever.

 

Somehow he’d found his own way out.


End file.
